


Scales Uneven and Balance Skewed

by icarus_chained



Category: Original Work
Genre: Companionship, Developing Friendships, Exhaustion, Fantasy, Gen, Monster Hunters, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Original Fiction, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 14:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10833096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: A vampire and a vampire hunter stand in a sunlit garden full of bodies, and have a quiet talk.





	Scales Uneven and Balance Skewed

**Author's Note:**

> Odd bit of a thing. I'm not nice to vampires usually, but this seemed a quiet bit of a thing.

The first thing anyone ever noticed about the doctor was that he looked tired. He _always_ looked tired. He was thin, verging on gaunt. His eyes looked sunken and bruised. His shoulders sloped naturally and his head had a tendency to droop forwards when he wasn't paying attention. His face looked young enough behind his glasses, pouched eyes aside, but his hair was feathered with grey. He looked _tired_. It was the first thing anyone noticed. The first impression anyone ever got was that here was exhaustion made manifest. Here was weariness given flesh, and not that much of it either.

It wasn't the sort of thing that inspired confidence anywhere else, Vera thought wryly. If most people had a sudden need for somebody to keep them alive, their first choice wasn't likely to be the dried-out twig that looked all of two seconds away from snapping under his own weight. He wasn't a reassuring figure, Dr Bright. Or he wouldn't be, anywhere else.

It was just that this wasn't anywhere else. These were the Badlands, and exhaustion was a way of life around here. She'd only arrived a couple of months ago and already she knew that. Hell, she'd known that inside a couple of _days_. People around here were all tired, always tired. Every last one. No one quite as much as the doctor, mind, few enough quite so borderline skeletal about it, but they were all tired. He didn't stand out that much. 

Just enough. To her, at least, just enough.

He worked hard, she'd give him that. He worked for his exhaustion, no doubt about it. And he was kind too. People trusted him for that. He was always there, always somewhere, always helping somebody or other. Had to, mostly. She'd noticed that too. Everyone around here was falling apart. Slowly but surely. They needed somebody, somebody like their doctor, worn and exhausted and patient. Always there. Life out here killed people. Wore them steadily away. They needed somebody, anybody, to stand in the face of that. And he did. He tried to. He did the best he could, as far as she could see, his genuine, _honest_ best. No playing for an audience here. He was honestly trying to help.

It was what made him so hard to spot. So hard to see for what he was. He just wasn't the sort of person people could look at and know they were looking at a monster. Hell, Vera hadn't thought it, at first. There'd been something, some fragment of an instinct, because she was what she was too and she hadn't survived as long as she had without knowing _something_ , but he was the first time in a long time that she'd actively doubted that instinct. She'd actively questioned it. You just couldn't look at him and think it. He was so _tired_. So gentle and careful and perpetually exhausted. He couldn't be a monster. He didn't have the _energy_.

But he was. He was. She'd found the bodies, finally. She'd found his burying ground. A village, or what had once been one, up in the hills away from town. There wasn't a lot left of it, however lively it might have been once upon a time. There were just the wooden skeletons of some old buildings now. A well. The stone foundations of a church. And the bodies. Laid to rest here and there and everywhere. Nice and neat and tended to.

They were hard to hide, his kind of bodies. They didn't decay the way normal corpses would. People killed by his kind of monster, by vampires, they had a tendency to try and come back afterwards. He'd been careful to avoid _that_ , at least. He was fastidious, was Dr Bright. There'd be no army of ghouls rising up on his account. The bodies in the hills, they'd been laid properly. Iron and ash, and wildflowers to cover them over. They wouldn't rot, not for a long time yet, but they wouldn't rise either. Neatly dead. Around a hundred strong. 

It was the neatness that got to her. The numbers and the neatness. He _was_ kind. He was kind and he was careful, and he'd laid them all so neatly. Down in the town, life was hard and mean and wore people down to their bones, and here in this empty village it was ... peaceful. Calm. Kind. The thought of it sent shivers up her spine. 

She'd never seen a monster like him. She knew what he was, but she'd never met his like before.

He knew her, too. Maybe he'd suspected her as long as she'd suspected him. It was hard to tell. Everyone in town suspected newcomers. A couple of months wasn't enough to change that. Everyone still stepped warily around her as a matter of course. These were the Badlands, after all. Anyone who wasn't blood or hadn't worked beside you for the better part of a lifetime was inherently suspect. Even then. Life was hard out here. Everyone looked at everyone with suspicion. It was hard to tell how long he'd been truly wary of her.

He'd known after the village, though. He'd known the moment she came back to town. She'd been out of the game a while. She'd been _trying_ to get out of the game. The village had shaken her. She wasn't as hardened anymore as she'd used to be, and even if she had been she thought the neatness would still have gotten to her. He'd seen it in her face. He'd known she knew him. He'd known she knew what he was.

He hadn't done anything, though. She'd waited. One day, two days. A week. She'd waited for him to do something about it. He hadn't. Not a word, not a threat. No teeth in the darkness to quietly tear her throat. He'd only waited. He'd only watched, and let her be.

Vera wasn't able for it anymore. She wasn't good at waiting. She had been, once, but that was a long time ago now. She was too tired herself these days. She'd seen too much. She'd hardened and hardened and hardened some more, until finally she couldn't harden any more. Finally she'd broken. Snapped, like some brittle piece of iron. She'd dragged herself away, then. She'd left the game to younger, faster, harder people, and she'd wandered off looking for somewhere where death wouldn't be such a grandiose, hideous affair as the game so often made it. Somewhere where death ... where death would be soft, and quiet, and kind. Somewhere where death would be just a calm, inevitable fact of life.

Damn it. _Damn_ it. But she was what she was. Even if she'd run from it. She was what she was, and she could stand to be it at least once more. She had to.

It really was peaceful up here. Beautiful too. The flowers grew over everything. They weren't fancy, not the kind of flowers you'd buy in cities. Just weeds, little tendrils and splashes of white and orange and yellow, but they were lovely still. They didn't entirely hide the bodies, but then ... that was the thing about his kind of corpses. They didn't rot. They didn't smell. They didn't draw flies. You could almost imagine they were statues. He'd laid them out like they were. Tomb effigies, still and silent under the flowers. So very neat.

She didn't hear him approach. She wasn't really surprised by that. Vampires were good at moving silently. She just looked up, turned a little in her seat to avoid the drifting sun, and there he was. Tired and stooped in the shade of a crumbled house. Grey and rumpled among the flowers and the bodies. She didn't startle. She didn't flinch.

He studied her, for a minute or two. She studied him in turn. She'd never had much cause to speak to him, in all the months she'd been here. Even if there hadn't been that fragment of instinct, she tended to look after her health herself. Habit and preference. Doctors were for when you'd lost too much blood to do the stitching yourself. She'd seen a lot of them, in her time, more than was probably healthy even for a woman of her profession, but she'd never had much time for them outside of raw necessity. If he hadn't been a monster, she'd likely have avoided him the same. 

If he hadn't been a monster. Hah.

"... They're not what you think," he said at last. Soft. She'd always known he had a soft voice. Faint and tired. He wandered nearer, careful to leave her room. Careful not to alarm her. "I know you won't believe me. Can't. But it isn't what you think."

"Oh?" she asked, and she was soft herself. "And what do I think, Dr Bright? What is it that they're not?"

He stopped. Stood stooped and careful in the sunshine. He looked at her. His eyes were bruised and sunken. His hands hung limp and lifeless. He looked more a corpse than the bodies at his feet. It wasn't an entirely inaccurate impression. She knew that. But there was a patience to him. There was a steadiness that could stand unflinching in the face of all eternity.

"They tried to kill us," he said. Still soft. Still calm. "All of them, at one time or another. They came to the town, and they tried to take someone, or they tried to hurt someone, or they ringed us round and threatened to slaughter us all if they didn't get what they wanted. You can ask. I've been here ... eighty years, I think. Something like that. There's people back in town who'll remember almost all of them, if you bring them up here and ask."

And she ... she wasn't surprised. She'd expected that, she thought. Something like it. He was a monster and he wanted to help. Tried. Worked himself to the bone. He was thin and tired and he wanted to help. Some of it he could do by doctoring. But he was a monster, first and foremost, and some of it he could do by other means.

"I put them up here, out of the way," he went on, quiet and careful. "I'm not sure what killed the village itself. That was before my time. It might have been sickness. They might just have moved to the town instead. It was empty when I came here. It's a good place for them. It keeps them out of the way. It warns people, too. A lot of the ... the outlaws, the ones who want to hurt people, they come down out of the hills. My garden lies in their path. There aren't as many these days as there used to be. They've been warned soundly enough."

"... I'm sure they have," Vera murmured, and she thought the thing she was feeling was something like grief, or pity. What a gentle, terrible monster he must be. "Is that why you look so tired now? Because they don't come as often anymore? Because you don't get to kill?"

Because he didn't get to _feed_. Not like he used to. One of his kind could live, or at least exist, on a mouthful here or there, the sort of thing a grateful town might offer him, but it was nothing like _feeding_. Nothing like killing, tearing, drinking hot heart's blood down until the body ran dry. Eighty years. There was close to a hundred bodies up here, maybe a little more, but he'd talked about them surrounding the town. Some of them had come in groups. Two or three big events, and then one or two a year, maybe less. More and more years coming in between as he went on, as his warning made the rounds. How hungry he must be. How terribly, terribly tired.

He chuckled at her. "I'd be flattered at your concern," he said, smiling crookedly. His eye teeth winked at her. "But I know it's not for me. I don't begrudge that. You won't believe me, perhaps, but I do value this town. These people. I've spent eighty years beside them. I've fought for them. I've killed for them. I've put them back together when they were hurt. I don't mind that you're afraid for them, hunter. If it were my place, I'd be grateful."

She closed her eyes. An appalling mistake, and a part of her expected teeth to blossom at her throat for it, but nothing happened. He made no move against her. The other part of her, the part that had let her do it in the first place, wasn't surprised.

"You can't keep going like this," she said, opening her eyes to look at him again. He looked back at her placidly, his hands still perfectly limp at his sides. She didn't plead with him. She didn't have to. She didn't say she wasn't a hunter anymore either. He wouldn't believe her, and to an extent it wasn't true. She was what she was. She was what she had to be. She always would be, when it became necessary. "You've done it well. I came here because it was supposed to be one of the safest places in the Badlands. I suppose I should have been suspicious of that sooner. Still. You've made your warning well. I don't suppose there's many who try you now. How long before it's someone who matters to you that you have to kill?"

"All of eternity," he answered, promptly and readily. She _looked_ at him, and his head ducked around his smile. "I know, I know. But I tired of slaughter for its own sake a long time ago, my dear, when I was a younger monster. It was ... surprising how quickly it paled, in some ways. But evil is very boring, you know. There's no real power in death, not by itself. Anything can kill someone. A pebble on the ground, if the fates are against them that day. There's nothing special in it. But _stopping_ death. Fighting it, keeping it at bay. That ... that is something more of a triumph."

Vera nearly laughed. Felt her breath hitch in her chest. Felt it burn. Yes, she knew. It was a familiar chain of thought. But she knew it from the other side, as perhaps most hunters did. She'd tired of it from the other direction.

"But it can't be stopped forever," she noted softly. "And when you stop one death by causing another, by causing _countless_ others ... is that really any victory at all?"

She'd seen such evil. She'd _killed_ such evil. But there was always more, and she'd watched so many be killed in the process. She'd bloodied her own hands so often. Past a certain point, it wasn't bearable. Or it was, and then you were something else. Then you were a monster, not a hunter, and sooner or later it would be someone's job to hunt you in your turn.

She'd stopped before then. She hoped, she _hoped_ , she'd stopped before that point.

"... My town lives," said Dr Bright. Said this tired, gentle monster. She looked at him, and found him looking kindly down at her. Calm and terrible. "I call that victory, yes. That is, what? A thousand or so lives in eighty years? And only a hundred spent for them, and those hundred killers all. I call that even enough. But yes, I know. I am a monster. I must kill to stay alive. My scales were skewed from the start."

Yes, she thought. Yes, they were. And how skewed were hers, that right now she almost felt the same? Which one of them had tipped over the other's line? Which one was less the monster, and which one more? She had a horrible feeling she knew the answer. She had a horrible feeling that it was _both_.

"... Must I destroy you?" she asked, very softly. "I don't think I want to. I'm tired. And I think, in your way, you are trying to help, as much as a monster can. But you can't go on this way forever. And if I leave it too late to try and stop you, I'm not sure I'll be able to."

He looked at her thoughtfully. Peaceably, even still, worn and tired and gentle in his garden full of bodies. His arms swung lightly in the sunshine. He offered no threat, and she didn't think he felt one either.

"I'll leave that choice to you," he said. "You're not one I could choose to kill. You don't kill for killing's sake, and it's my people you want to defend. Either one puts you out of my bounds, and both together ... no. No, I won't be killing you either way. But I won't be killing them either. Not eighty years down the line. No matter how hungry I get, my dear, they are beyond me. If it comes to it, I'll just leave. If it comes to it, if they've become safe enough that no threat comes to them for years on end, I'll go somewhere else. These are the Badlands, after all. There are killers and monsters aplenty out here. I'll find somewhere beset by them. I'll start planting myself a new garden. I've done it before, and whether now or later I suspect I'll do it again. You don't have to worry, my dear. If you don't want to, you won't have to destroy me. I can leave. It won't have to be you."

And she thought ... Heaven help her, she thought she believed him. He would leave. He wouldn't kill her. He wouldn't kill them. And maybe that wasn't _better_ , maybe that just made him some other poor hunter's problem, but Vera was _tired_. She was so tired. She'd come here to escape the game. She wasn't able for it anymore. She didn't want to have to kill him. The town knew him. The town trusted him. They'd worked beside him for eighty years, many of them had likely offered blood to him. He'd shed blood for them in turn. These were the Badlands. Those things mattered here, as much or more than anything else. They mattered to hunters, too. They mattered to _her_. Some of the monsters she'd spent her life killing had been human. Could it be so terrible to have one of the ones she spared be a vampire?

And besides. Beyond all that. When it came down to it, before anything else, she didn't want to kill him. He was tired, and kind, and she didn't want to kill him. However much of a monster he was, and however much of a monster it made her in turn.

"Will you let me watch you?" she asked at last. Softly, tiredly, but they were made that way these days. Weariness given flesh, and not that much of it. Him and her both, and the rest of the Badlands along with them. "I need to know what you do. Who you kill. I need to know I haven't made a mistake. Will you let me?"

He blinked at her, long and hard. And then he smiled, and inclined his stooped head gratefully.

"I will," he said quietly. "For as long as the town is ours to share, my dear. I will."

And well, she thought. Well then. That was it, then, wasn't it?

After everything, that was that.


End file.
